Weather

“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”
― Pema Chödrön

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No Narrative                    A. E. Watkins

A paradise forecloses once an aperture—no narrative but trees
are saying birds between them. Sun through green leaves like green

stained glass—a bright room, the birds spoken in through
a window—translating between two

weathers: the birds as captives or portents.
The forest and feathered currents

coursing its chambers; what to think
of open doors, the emptied sanctuary Your trilling

lingers the rafters now branching several scenes.
No narrative but birds on wires humming between

poles—lining the street—front doors and absence cut in each
tree to let wires through: an entrance by which

a blood-thick night can pass.
The birds with beaks pulled to breasts, their small claws clasp

a wilderness humming sun-lit rooms and flitting. 

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  from  Ice Cream  by Robert Creeley

Where we are there must

be something to place us.

Look around. What do you see

that you can recognize.

.

Anxious about the weather,

folding the door shut, unwrapping

the floor covering and rolling it

forward at the door.

.

So that’s what you do:

ask the same questions

and keep answering.

.

Was that right.

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Language has no weather, and therefore is not, strictly speaking, an environment.

~from Jennifer Moxley's 'Fragments of a Broken Poetics'

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APPREHENDING THE WEATHER IN KANSAS                 Jon Kelly Yenser

For Becca

I'd forgotten that
the front edge of a front
seems its opposite

a long in-drawing
a sough up high in the elms
in the maples a sigh.

Just before the first drops
icy and big as dimes change
things for the better

the wind comes up.
You never mistake the storm
for what came before.

I grew up agape
and breathless in this weather
and the pulse it kept.

**********

Ghost                 Mark Irwin

Now your name's just a guest here, one that cancels
all hellos. Fleshless
you come & go through the mansion

of air. How
will I address you, small
weather? Sometimes your name's

a dress like an iron
bell the years
swing shadows from

longer that home. Can you hear
that word peal? I'm going
there now,

carrying the windows
from inside
all the vowels. 

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Thinking Sky (Apparently)

I keep a file of writing I want to remember, to think about--writing I admire.

I've been doing this for 20 years, so there are actually many files, ordered chronologically by the time of my discovery of the writing. I started a new file last week, and there are fewer than two pages in it thus far, but already there are three references to sky. Which are:

“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”
― Pema Chödrön

 

No Sky

Martha Ronk

after Robert Adams’s California: Views


No sky a gray backdrop merely and absence
and below: the scraggle of dusty fronds, the scrub oak and scrub jay
whose abrasive noises sharpen in response.

Shadows proliferate in deep furrows no sky above
merely a scrim registering conical thrusts, a heightened flurry &
outlines of branches, the dead ones slowly petering out.

magnificent ruin the cut through the field blasted chaparral

As I understand my job, it is, while suggesting order, to make things appear as much as possible to be the way they are in normal vision.

An unvoiced series of sentences, without articulation,
with gray shapes, formulating a syntax loosening and then tightening from edge to edge.

The frame sets a border down from which a thin straggle hangs at random &
like purposeful intrusion, and so unlike

and the interstate (in the title) missing from the photograph itself
merely a dry riverbed, the density of shadows trapped in the confusion
of bush and bush-like tree

except from higher up than the rest, its thin trunk arched against
no sky

colorless, less often remarked upon, appositely emotionless these days,
a relic, like the fan palm living at the edges of water.

Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, famously put it this way: “Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the moon in the sky, and words to a finger. The finger can point to the moon, but it can never be the moon. To see the moon, you have to look beyond the finger.”  (from an interview with Chase Twichell at Chapter 16)

Poems as Problems

I tend to use problem-solving as a metaphor for life. It happens without any conscious decision-making on my part. For example, when I turn the three-sided faucet valve to shut off the hose, I can't help wondering which placement of my fingers on the three sides would turn the faucet off most quickly (I mean which two sides should I grasp this turn, and the next, and the next), with least energy expenditure. I have my own way of drying dishes which I am convinced saves time by about 10%. All these thoughts come into my head unbidden; problem-solving is simply the paradigm from within which I see the world (and within is, I think, the operative word here).

Recently I read a quote by Pema Chodron, the Buddhist priest, about how not everything is a problem to be solved; some things simply were. Immediately I knew this was something I needed to think about, almost a problem for me to solve--how to stop seeing everything in terms of problems. But first I wondered if it really was such a problem that I see things in terms of problems. (And the logical inconsistencies in this argument are so much fun to think about! If it is a problem that I think in terms of problems, then it's a problem that I'm thinking about it as a problem, ad infinitum. And if it's not a problem, if it simply is, then I have to (get to) leave in place my problem-solving paradigm because it's not a problem! This is what I mean about within being the operative word.)

I also use problem-solving as a metaphor, or perhaps a paradigm, for writing poems. I am always thinking of finding the right form or the best word or a breakthrough effect as a problem for me to solve. I had consciously thought that this way of seeing my writing was helpful--it encourages creative solutions. But now I wonder if by setting out the parameters of what I'm going to solve means that I circumvent the process which would allow me to make those poetic leaps I admire in other poets. Or maybe I can do both--solve what I think I'm solving while my unconscious makes those leaps.

So that's what I've been thinking about.

And what I'd like to know from you, if you care to comment, is whether you have an overarching metaphor or paradigm for looking at life, and/or your writing process.

Resistance Quotes

Resistance is on my mind these days, for oh so many reasons. So today I offer quotes on resistance:


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"It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human."

Pema Chodron

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"The poem resists. It resists coming into being. It resists eloquence. It resists transmitting unpleasant or embarrassing knowledge. It resists grammatical constraints. It resists moving away from simple utterance. It resists revision. It resists completion. It resists success. Hopefully, the poet resists as well."

Jennifer Moxley, from "Fragments of a Broken Poetics" (Chicago Review, Spring 2010)

 

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"The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self. The solution is to become one’s language."

 

Stanley Kunitz

 

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"…remember fear for what it is: a resistance to the unknown."

 

Terry Tempest Williams, from an interview on the NPR show “Being,” interviewed by Krista Tippett (who read this excerpt from a book of Williams’)

 

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"Art begins with resistance – at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor."

 

Andre Gide, in Poetique

 

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"The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully"

 

Wallace Stevens  (CP, 350)

 

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"Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love." 

Simone Weil

 

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“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.” 

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Leonardo da Vinci

 

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“Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds. ” 

 

Dan Millman

 

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“Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.” 

 

Donald Miller